[H]e failed his engineering examination for the Higher National
Certificate and perspicaciously decided "to recycle myself as an
intellectual". The process had begun in 1943, when he began to read
Nikolaus Pevsner's
Outline of European Architecture while
waiting in a bus queue and becoming so enthralled with the book that he
missed the bus. Later, he recalled, "I can still see the back of that
blasted bus as it pulled away, graven in my mind's eye as a marker for
the moment when I became an architectural historian."
-- Reyner Banham, quoted in review by by Thomas S. Hines
of Reyner Banham Historian of the immediate future
by Nigel Whiteley; Times Literary Supplement, April 3, 2002.